Sports Authority
Last weekend, I was standing in line at the checkout at Sports Authority. There were two people ahead of me. The first one paid in cash, and received a fair number of bills back in
change.
Let’s say it was $19, which would be six bills. She made a point of counting the change.
(I am pretty sure I could look at $19 and know it was $19 in 1/10 of a second, but she
counted it out very deliberately.) The cashier stared at her with complete disgust and contempt with this “how dare you not trust me!” look on his face.
Literally 60 seconds later, the next customer paid in cash, with exact change. It was roughly six bills again, and the same cashier dutifully counted out the bills one at a time,
without the slightest sense of the irony.
One might argue that the cashier is inherently more trustworthy because he’s acting on behalf of the store rather than himself, and has less incentive to cheat. But that’s not quite true… he could be overcharging customers and pocketing money.
It strikes me that this is very analogous to asymmetrical trust on eBay. Most sellers won’t ship an item until payment arrives, which somehow implies that sellers are more scrupulous than buyers. In fact, on eBay, and in Sports Authority, this asymmetrical trust is unjustified. Both buyers and sellers could be cheating with nearly equal probability, and it does not make sense to automatically trust the seller more than the buyer.
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